China’s rising clouds

When it comes to cloud domination, there’s a lot of talk around what the Big Three are doing. In the West, Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure) and Google (GCP) lead the public cloud market, and it would be easy to assume that this ranking is pretty much the same wherever you go. But then there’s China, with its own cloud market that will triple in size by 2027, according to projections from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a government think tank. China now has the world’s second-largest cloud market after the US, with Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Baidu being the main players. But unlike the rest of the world, China is not dependant on the US hyperscalers and is actively expanding its cloud companies’ footprints across Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and Africa.

In 2024, Huawei opened the first major cloud region in Egypt. The year before, Alibaba launched its cloud regions in South Africa and Mozambique through a partnership with BCX. Under the African Local Public (ALP) Cloud model, BCX can now offer Alibaba’s Aspara Stack – the same platform trusted by Chinese government agencies, state-owned banks and telcos.